Wednesday, March 25, 2015

The Pete Riss Superman Stories

I posted the text earlier about Pete Riss actually drawing the Superman
stories that have been attributed to Sam Citron for so
long—here are
the lists of his work on the character.

I see that in Citron's art for Warren, Gold Key, and DC in
the Sixties, he has some poses reminiscent of Wayne Boring's as far as
the tilt of a head here and there; I wonder if his Superman
work
was all with Boring and the Shuster studio, and thus
particularly
hard to pick out? Pete Riss is not at all hard to pick out when you
compare these stories with his credited work at Timely.

On that earlier post I misremembered the "Killer Riss" sneak as from
"The Quicksilver Kid," but it was from "The Great Godini."

4 comments:

Somewhere in all the papers dug up for the recent Siegel vs DC court case there's a letter from Whitney Ellsworth to Siegel asking him to take Citron off Robotman and put him on Superman. A sequence of events that places Citron's Superman work much earlier than the stories now attributed to Riss.

It puts his work in the early Superman period that I haven't yet felt strong enough to venture into, as far as artists go. I'm comfortable from the point where the styles of Sikela, Dobrotka, Yarbrough, Riss and others become pretty distinctive.

Recently a fan over on Facebook produced a whole stack of DC check stubs that give the credits for some 1943-44 Superman stories. All your work on identifying Pete Riss stories is substantiated therein. As for Sam Citron, it appears that he drew most of the stories that had been attributed to Ed Dobrotka! Where that leaves Dobrotka is now the question. Other than one story from after the war there weren't any Dobrotka credits in the pile. Hopefully more, earlier data is forthcoming.

The problem with those pay records is that the info on them is second-hand. In the note on "Superman's Search for Clark Kent" I see Citron named among the people involved, but the check was made out to Joe Shuster to disperse. Jack Schiff could only record what was passed along to him by the Shuster Shop.

The pencilling on that one, upon inspection of the story itself, is by the artist who also worked on Seven Soldiers of Victory, Captain Marvel, and Captain Triumph. That would have to be Ed Dobrotka, who was in comics only through 1946 as far as I know. Sam Citron worked into the 1960s, and some of his later stories, like those at ACG, are credited, with no trace of this style showing.